Bombardier Global Express E-11A 1/27/2020

DEVGRU went in and recovered two bodies and some of the technology. Two bodies seems to suggest no one other than the pilot(s)/operators were onboard at the time.
 
If you ever get a chance and are at BAF you should go meet and talk to those guys about what they really can/can’t do that isn’t in the standard power point briefs we all see on sharedrives. It is a very odd mix of 1950s and 23rd century technology and a whole lot of weird added on items in between.

BAF, that sounds lovely. I'm thinking about diving back in for a couple of years of ME flying. I sold the prince's Hawker 4000 one piece at a time and need to think if I have the enthusiasm to tackle a new aircraft at 55.

I actually have some loose ties to a few systems that are still around. Over the years I've had a couple of very small contracts reviewing updates to ADA code in a few systems, mostly SADL. I also did a bit of JREAP work related to Link 16. That's been 15 years ago so I never saw the resulting gateways that tie everything together. The E-11 snuck in without me noticing.

When I mentioned Compass Call, I was thinking of the new G550 platform for that mission. I assumed that the E-11 was the new Compass Call platform.
 
AF accident report is out.

Short summary: they had a left engine (fan blade loss) failure at altitude, misdiagnosed which engine failed, and shut down the right engine. They then could not get either engine restarted and landed off-field, hitting some dirt berm type structures on the ground leading to break-up and fire. Sad.

 
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At the point of the dual engine out emergency, the MA’s position was approximately 38 nautical miles (NM) from Bagram Airfield, 17 NM from Kabul International Airport, 28 NM from Forward Operating Base (FOB) Shank, and 230 NM from KAF

Wow so they shut down the wrong engine and did so super fast (24 sec after failure) and then decided to glide to the furthest airport. Huh?
 
Wow so they shut down the wrong engine and did so super fast (24 sec after failure) and then decided to glide to the furthest airport. Huh?

If you’re aren’t intimately familiar with that terrain you might not get while Sharana is further in distance from just looking at the map it’s the one with the least amount of barriers to hit in their flight path.

Kabul and BAF both would have serious barriers and require them to thread the needle below 14k. From where they were over Highway 1, a few miles south and a 90 degree turn is a straight open plain to the Sharana Plateau with a straight in for the runway. Plus there was FOB Scorpion at the time down there, though I don’t know how well that plane would land on a very moon powder dirt strip. Even the 130s didn’t like landing there.


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AF accident report is out.

Short summary: they had a left engine (fan blade loss) failure at altitude, misdiagnosed which engine failed, and shut down the right engine. They then could not get either engine restarted and landed off-field, hitting some dirt berm type structures on the ground leading to break-up and fire. Sad.

*flat, hostile stare*

OMG. Doing all that at altitude?! Wtf. Why?!
Yeah. Nope.
 
Kabul and BAF both would have serious barriers
Even that being so, they were only 17 miles from Kabul and 38 from Bagram. This all happened at 43,000 ft so even with a 2/1 glide ratio (being generous) they shoulda been able to glide 80+ miles. Maybe it's just me, but after Sully plopped it into the Hudson glide is something that I think about more than before. Sometimes the closest airport may be behind you.
 
Even that being so, they were only 17 miles from Kabul and 38 from Bagram. This all happened at 43,000 ft so even with a 2/1 glide ratio (being generous) they shoulda been able to glide 80+ miles. Maybe it's just me, but after Sully plopped it into the Hudson glide is something that I think about more than before. Sometimes the closest airport may be behind you.

Most of the peaks around that area start at 14k.

Wide left turn for Shank would be the same, you’d have to first cross the barrier segmenting the valley for highway 1, no issue from altitude... but then you get to perform a lineup on Shank (now Dalke) which sits in a bowl surrounded by more peaks, particularly if they lined it up for a south to north straight in because 13k will barely clear the power lines in that valley.

The terrain to their north is also far more undulating even where it isn’t straight mountains and slopes up from where they were to get to BAF/Kabul. There are far fewer options to ditch out there and way more stuff (towers and the like) to hit. Remember in this part of the country every house has an 8 foot Adobe wall built surrounding the property and they are everywhere up there. It’s not the vast desolate nothing of the western Helmand or places down south.

If anything attempting a restart on the path they were flying was a fast evaluation of staying over the lowest ground possible with also the opportunity to land on the one good flat straight road in the region if it didn’t work out. That not working and heading lower and lower while pouting into the airborne valley (not a fun place) it looks like they made the call to try for Sharana (old Soviet field sits at 7500’, slopes up severely to the east, and isn’t occupied) and no longer had the reach to get it.


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Most of the peaks around that area start at 14k.

Wide left turn for Shank would be the same, you’d have to first cross the barrier segmenting the valley for highway 1, no issue from altitude... but then you get to perform a lineup on Shank (now Dalke) which sits in a bowl surrounded by more peaks, particularly if they lined it up for a south to north straight in because 13k will barely clear the power lines in that valley.

The terrain to their north is also far more undulating even where it isn’t straight mountains and slopes up from where they were to get to BAF/Kabul. There are far fewer options to ditch out there and way more stuff (towers and the like) to hit. Remember in this part of the country every house has an 8 foot Adobe wall built surrounding the property and they are everywhere up there. It’s not the vast desolate nothing of the western Helmand or places down south.

If anything attempting a restart on the path they were flying was a fast evaluation of staying over the lowest ground possible with also the opportunity to land on the one good flat straight road in the region if it didn’t work out. That not working and heading lower and lower while pouting into the airborne valley (not a fun place) it looks like they made the call to try for Sharana (old Soviet field sits at 7500’, slopes up severely to the east, and isn’t occupied) and no longer had the reach to get it.


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Kam Air 904, the 737, ended up impacted at 11K elevation in the mountains east of Kabul 16 years ago. That was one tough rescue/recovery operation.

For flights in the area NE and E of the bowl there, we had to be reminded that if we have to bailout of our jet at any time over there, we had to immediately manually initiate seat-man separation and deploy our chutes, otherwise we’d impact the terrain, since the ejection seat is waiting to sense 14K +/- 1K MSL, and it has no idea what it’s AGL is.
 
How does the military train engine out procedures? Are they done from memory or checklist and is identify/verify a thing?

For a crew aircraft, like every other crew aircraft does, by checklist. For a single seat jet, by memory.

Remember too, with aircraft like these where there is a civil equivalent, the military aircrews normally go to a Flight Safety or equivalent contractor training course.
 
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Even that being so, they were only 17 miles from Kabul and 38 from Bagram. This all happened at 43,000 ft so even with a 2/1 glide ratio (being generous) they shoulda been able to glide 80+ miles. Maybe it's just me, but after Sully plopped it into the Hudson glide is something that I think about more than before. Sometimes the closest airport may be behind you.


Would they still get 2/1 if pitching for the min speed to air-start? Also, it’s carrying some extra drag compared to stock Globals. And there are some place they probably didn’t want to set down, including the city. It’s not like flying CONUS.

FWIW, that CAS display sucks. I zoomed in, held my phone at arm’s length, and shook it. The engine instruments and the messages were unreadable. If the fault messages went down the left side for the left engine and the right side for the right engine, then one could say “I don’t know what’s wrong, but the right side is lit like a Christmas tree. Secure Right Engine.” All the sim sessions were probably...predictable.
 
Kam Air 904, the 737, ended up impacted at 11K elevation in the mountains east of Kabul 16 years ago. That was one tough rescue/recovery operation.

For flights in the area NE and E of the bowl there, we had to be reminded that if we have to bailout of our jet at any time over there, we had to immediately manually initiate seat-man separation and deploy our chutes, otherwise we’d impact the terrain, since the ejection seat is waiting to sense 14K +/- 1K MSL, and it has no idea what it’s AGL is.

Most of the instrument recovery procedures in that region cannot be performed in a helicopter for the same reason of no achievable altitude for safe terrain clearance. That’s why all the units built special low altitude GPS emergency recoveries.

The place is truly the most god forsaken land human beings ever decided to occupy.


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Even that being so, they were only 17 miles from Kabul and 38 from Bagram. This all happened at 43,000 ft so even with a 2/1 glide ratio (being generous) they shoulda been able to glide 80+ miles. Maybe it's just me, but after Sully plopped it into the Hudson glide is something that I think about more than before. Sometimes the closest airport may be behind you.
When Ariana started domestic air service in Kabul in the mid 1960s with DC3’s, they’d climb to 19,000 temporarily to get over ridges and descend back down. My dad and uncle were part of the program that pan am started up. My dad passed away 18 months ago so I came up to sfo to have dinner with my uncle last night. He was telling me some wild stories of the way things were back then. He and my dad were fresh co pilots in the DC3, with Pan Am captains training them on the line for 2 years.
I can just imagine Pan Am sending out letters to its pilots offering this TDY to Kabul. Lmao
 
When Ariana started domestic air service in Kabul in the mid 1960s with DC3’s, they’d climb to 19,000 temporarily to get over ridges and descend back down. My dad and uncle were part of the program that pan am started up. My dad passed away 18 months ago so I came up to sfo to have dinner with my uncle last night. He was telling me some wild stories of the way things were back then. He and my dad were fresh co pilots in the DC3, with Pan Am captains training them on the line for 2 years.
I can just imagine Pan Am sending out letters to its pilots offering this TDY to Kabul. Lmao
Funny you mentioned that.
I was having a conversation with a gate agent in IAH, a Russian woman, couple of weeks back. Her and her husband were working for Ariana for 12, I think, years and came over to the USA after the war started in Afghanistan.
 
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